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A Civil Rights Heroine Carries Her Torch Song to the Stage

By

Bruce Bennett

Jan. 23, 2013 9:57 p.m. ET

"You never know how many people you will touch in what you do," Myrlie Evers-Williams said last week. On Monday, an estimated 1.8 million global viewers saw and heard the 79-year-old social-justice advocate, educator, author, and twice-widowed mother deliver the inaugural invocation on the Capital steps with a refrain from Lucie Campbell's 1919 patriotic hymn "Something Within"—the first layperson and first woman to do so.

Five weeks earlier, Ms. Evers-Williams—who is linked in American history with...